[8] Sometime after December 16, 1901, Sterling began to write a long poem depicting the galaxies and stars of "the stellar universe at strife, when to the eye it is a symbol of such peace and changelessness ...It surely is a war if the cosmic processes are viewed as a whole.

It was a mad orgy of imagination ...The poem swung in majestic rhythm to the cool tumult of interstellar conflict, to the onset of starry hosts, to the impact of cold suns and the flaming up of nebulae in the darkened void; and through it all, unceasing and faint, like a silver shuttle, ran the frail, piping voice of man, a querulous chip amid the screaming of planets and the crash of systems.

"[16] Three months after that: "First, I hope it will be clear enough to the intellectual reader that my invocation to the stars is only an allegory of man's search of the universe for the secret of life ..."[17] Sterling wrote "The Testimony of the Suns" using accentual-syllabic verse in iambic tetrameter rhythm, structured as four-line stanzas using the ABBA rhyme format.

[29] Selected Poems was eventually printed by four different publishers based in four different cities: New York: Henry Holt, 1923; San Francisco: A. M. Robertson, 1923; St. Clair Shores, Michigan: Scholarly Press, 1970; and [Irvine, California]: Reprint Services Corp., 1974.

Thirteen months after Sterling's November 1926 death, the prestigious Book Club of California published an oversize (14+5⁄8 by 9+1⁄2 in or 37 by 24 cm) volume as a beautifully-designed tribute.

Historian David Magee said: "The poet was a protege of Ambrose Bierce whose annotations and suggestions, reproduced here in facsimile, show how closely student and mentor worked together.

The third version of "The Testimony of the Suns" was included in the George Sterling anthology, The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror, S. T. Joshi, ed.

The final version of "The Testimony of the Suns" (the one from Selected Poems) appeared in George Sterling, Complete Poetry, S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, eds.

The poem is printed in both English and Spanish on facing pages and is annotated in George Sterling, El Testimonio de los Soles y Otros Poemas: Edicióne Crítica y Bilingüe, Ariadna García Carreño, ed.

Bierce's passionate review was reprinted in the New York Evening Journal, the San Francisco Examiner, and in Sterling's birthplace newspaper, the Sag Harbor Corrector.

[31] The New York Times' admiration was more muted: "In The Testimony of the Suns and Other Poems, by George Sterling, ...there is a nice sense of personal vision and thoughtful contemplation, and also there is a touch of intellectual passion that gives to the author's mental attitude toward common things the delicate dignity and reserve in utterance most grateful to the mind weary of an overflow of sentiment.

Here again the longer poems [such as "The Testimony of the Suns"] are the best and the most characteristic ..." The Times review ended: "...the presence of the moral quality at the source of Mr. Sterling's poetry is what gives it the note of character that promises permanence.

The "Testimony of the Sun[s]," which gives the book its name, while it has many good qualities is surpassed by the ode to "Music" ...The volume has in it an unspeakable note of sadness, which adds greatly to its appealing powers, and we feel that here is a man who has suffered and conquered nobly.

"[35] The New York Evening Post commented on the second edition of Sterling's book: "It boots not that "The Testimony of the Suns" is the most distinguished poetic work produced in the West in years.

"[37] The Lincoln Nebraska State Journal reported: "It has been said by the critics that this age is without real poets; that the living writers of verse cannot approach the majestic, soul-uplifting, hair-curling heights attained by the artists of old whose scope of thought may only be apprehended by the tutored mind.

...And while "the testimony of the suns" yields no satisfying solution of the great problem of life and death, we are forced to admit that in style and diction it is bully good poetry.

"[43] One unusual form of criticism came from Clarence E. Eddy, a prospector, poet, reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune, and editor and publisher of the Roosevelt, Idaho Thunder Mountain News.

But Eddy believed that Sterling's poem failed because: Beyond unnumbered suns it sings, But sobs at last by gulfs of night In weariness it folds its wings ...[44] Eddy later expanded his poem's points in a lengthy prose review, stating that Sterling "is essentially a poet of humanity, but, as a prelude, sings of the heavens; he diverts us from our littleness and the lusts of earth to contemplate all of God's great handiwork that human reason can grasp.

But Sterling's "Testimony" did not satisfy Eddy: "Thus contemplating the vast wonders and questioning the mysteries of creation, and knowing man's craving for immortality, the poet does not give us the final word of hope for which we hunger, and it is this, if anything, that the great poem fails.

One lays the book down with a sense of bereavement, for though its music has sweep upon the heart-strings and its majesty has borne the mind amid the systems of unnumbered suns, it ceases at last in a sob.

He sat for a bas relief portrait by sculptor Robert Ingersoll Aitken, best known today for his sculptures on the United States Supreme Court building.

"[47] In Missouri, the St. Louis Republic was not impressed: "In short, Mr. Sterling is enjoyable after you have past the ‘choral trumpet's gleam' and the ‘doubting vans,' and passed through the mystic mistiness of the ‘Suns' poem and learned to brush away some of the ‘fine writing' and find the deeper truth and beauty.

...Mr. Sterling really gives the impression of a certain largeness of utterance here and there in single lines and purple patches, but he fails in the main seemingly from the lack of a sense of humor.

Quite so, but written in American and published in San Francisco, it has attracted the attention of the infinitesimally few—the few, the happy few, the band of brothers, who really care for art, and recognize it whether the medium be painting, poetry, or our own august mystery.

"[52] A Nevada-based critic agreed, stating in a joint review of Sterling's book and Poems of Both Worlds by Herman George Scheffauer: "...their work is fired over the heads of the masses and so filled with erudition as not to strike the popular fancy.

In National Magazine, St. Louis editor William Maron Reedy said: "George Sterling wrote there the best book of verse of the last four years, The Testimony of the Suns.

Already the young poet's brilliant but too facile craftsmanship was tempted by the worst excesses of the Tennysonian tradition: he never thinks—he deems; he does not ask, but craves; he is fain for this and that; he deals in emperies and auguries and antiphons, in causal throes and lethal voids—in many other things of tinsel and fustian, the frippery of a by-gone fashion.

...The poem's final statement, then, is of ‘the impotence and eternal loneliness of human beings, involved in some vast and incomprehensible law of cyclic recurrence.'

Bierce had helped make Sterling into a significant transitional figure—a poet whose nineteenth-century rhetoric and traditional stock of images contrast sharply with [his] very modern sense of despair.

...It remains an austere and very sober disquisition on the uncharted and star-strewn immensities of the cosmic-astronomic spaces, as well as the utter indifference of the cosmos at large to human beings and their concerns while residing and evolving on a small and inconspicuous planet circling around an insignificant sun located at the edge of the Milky Way, one galaxy among billions.